8×8 has released four feature updates to pull together its enterprise communications portfolio.
By announcing each as part of one coordinated release, 8×8 aims to support businesses in unifying their fragmented customer service stack.
With this theme front of mind, here’s a sneak peek of 8×8’s latest release.
1. 8×8 JourneyIQ: A New Tool to Centralize Data from Across the Comms Stack
8×8 JourneyIQ connects data from across the vendor’s CCaaS, UCaaS, and CPaaS solutions.
In doing so, the solution pulls data from various journey touchpoints into a single customer view.
The innovation will drive most value for midmarket companies with multiple departments interacting with customers.
Many businesses struggle to track these engagements, creating CX blind spots and missed opportunities to improve the customer journey.
After making this point, Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder & Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, noted:
8×8 JourneyIQ allows organizations to cut through all the complexity and unify every customer touchpoint, both inside and outside of the contact center, to provide a single, real-time view.
“It’s no longer enough to react after a poor customer experience; organizations need the intelligence and ability to proactively identify and prevent issues to transform the customer journey,” she concluded.
2. 8×8 Brings RCS to CCaaS
RCS is the next evolution of SMS, enabling rich media, typing indicators, group chats, and more – with Apple now supporting RCS on its native messaging app.
8×8 contact center customers may now leverage the channel to engage in two-way conversations, upgrade the messaging experience, and run analytics across the channel.
Notably, 8×8 also allows for branded messaging. That’s an excellent feature for customer service teams engaging in proactive messaging.
After all, customers often contact customer service only to authenticate a message they recieved. At one point, Gartner estimated that two-thirds of consumers had contacted customer service after receiving proactive notifications from a brand.
Branded messaging gives them confidence that outreach is genuine.
Sharing his perspective on the announcement, Dave Michels, Founder of TalkingPointz, said:
Many of the CPaaS providers are talking about how RCS is taking off as a preferred channel for brands, but I haven’t heard any of the CCaaS providers embrace RCS as part of their omnichannel comms — until now.
“RCS took so long that it actually snuck up on us. Almost every cellular user will be RCS enabled by the end of this year – and it’s already ubiquitous in several countries,” he summarized.
With its CPaaS backbone, 8×8 can quickly pull these new channels into its contact center environment and run automation over them.
3. 8×8 Empowers External Employees with More Contact Center Tools
12 months ago, 8×8 launched Engage to empower business-wide UCaaS users – who “engage” with customers – access to CCaaS capabilities.
Think of sales and marketing teams, field service personnel, and store associates. All these employees can benefit from contact center tech.
Now, with this latest update of 8×8 Engage, these UCaaS users may interact with customers across video, WhatsApp, and other digital channels.
“While engaging with customers across both voice and digital channels has been a staple for contact center agents, it is still a highly fragmented and siloed experience for those employees outside of the contact center,” added Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research.
By adding digital channels to 8×8 Engage, these workers now have an expanded arsenal to elevate customer engagement and deliver an even more seamless, impactful customer experience.
Moreover, the move further blurs the line between the contact center and broader customer engagement – recognizing that customer service extends beyond agent interactions.
4. 8×8 Launches an AI Orchestration Solution to Manage a Multi-Bot Future
IBM, Pegasystems, and ServiceNow have all released enterprise-wide AI orchestration solutions to monitor, manage, and improve a business’s agentic AI strategy.
8×8 has taken this strategy down to the customer experience level, announcing the 8×8 AI Orchestrator that allows contact centers to mix and match AI agents from various vendors.
Consider a customer-facing agent as an example of where this may add value. It may communicate with another agent inside a customer database to pull pertinent information for handling a particular customer query. The orchestrator allows 8×8 customers to compose that flow.
Giving his taking in the 8×8 AI Orchestrator, Justin Robbins, Principal Analyst at Metric Sherpa, said:
As companies adopt multiple AI bots across different vendors, orchestration becomes the missing layer. 8×8’s solution allows for seamless handoffs between bots, human agents, and workflows—without losing context or control.
“This reflects a growing reality: CX AI is going multi-vendor, and platforms need to adapt accordingly,” he concluded.
What Do These Feature Updates Tell Us About 8×8’s Strategy?
In closing the gap between CCaaS, UCaaS, and CPaaS, 8×8 focuses on interaction data as a key asset.
As most evident in the JourneyIQ tool, the vendor is leaning toward data normalization and harmonization – a crucial aspect of modern data management.
Enterprise communications data is notoriously difficult to standardize, but the 8×8 engineering team is tackling it head-on, pulling in new communications data across RCS and Engage.
In doing so, 8×8 looks to differentiate, which is becoming increasingly challenging in CCaaS.
Samuel Wilson, CEO of 8×8, acknowledged this during the 2025 8×8 Analyst Summit in Southampton. He commented:
I believe firmly that it’s very hard for a software company to gain a long-term competitive advantage based on features. A feature can be arbitraged out by a scrum team developing new code.
Given this landscape, 8×8’s vision for an integrated customer interaction data platform is commendable, as it extends beyond just the contact center space.
